lørdag den 28. marts 2009

Animation tests on Forest

Finally I got the go to start touching the puppets for the Bachelor project 'Forest'. I have spend the last two days trying out stop motion animation for the first time and I am loving it!
Already now I can feel that a lot of practical knowledge about animation can be gained through this very hands-on method of animating. There aren't room for shaky hands or clumpsy feet or friends and ctrl-z is non-existing!
Here are two small test scenes I did with the main character of the story, enjoy! I know I did!

lørdag den 14. marts 2009

One week of 1st pass animation


This is how the scene looks at the moment. There are still a few things I want to get more into, but in general it communicates the mood and feeling I set out to depict.
It has been very interesting to try out this new approach and I think that I have taken a really big step in the right direction.
I will ellaborate more on the work methods I used and the thoughts and choices made.
Please feel free to leave a comment with ideas, critique, praise or questions. Hope you enjoy it.

tirsdag den 3. marts 2009

Sketching / thumbnailing


I've spend around a day sketching the characters now, getting into drawing them, coming up with the actions of the scene, the diferent beats and trying to build up poses that would give me the opportunity to reach my goals for the assignment.
As I wrote in the previous post, Mike Nguyen and Alex Williams are both at the school at the moment and I have meetings with them both tomorow about my thumbnails and plan for the scene. Should be very interesting to hear what they have to say to my doodles.
The sketching phase isnt over yet at all, but I thought I share with you the first raw drawings I've done that fits the acting and action I want to animate.
Please feel free to comment with suggestions, questions, critique or praise as always.

New scene: Old Couple

The hairdresser scene has been put away for now, the scene for Tod Polson has been finished and send with him to Thailand and I am not ready to take on a new assignment finally!

For a long time I have wanted to animate the two characters I am going to spend my next weeks alongside. I have both Alex Williams, who is now our Animation Supervisor, and Mike Nguyen, who is teaching the first years, to overlook the early stages of my scene. Can't be much better than that really.

I spend about two and half hours talking to Mike the other day and he had a lot of great things to share. I will write a post about my conversation with him soon.


The focus of this assignment for me is to create a more believable and emotional performance as well as have the characters interact in such a way that the viewer clearly feels that these characters are filled with life. I will try a more straight-ahead'ish method to reach this goal. Mike is stopping by my workspace tomorow to talk about thumbnails to animation. Cant wait to hear him out on this.

For now, thumbnailing and imagining funny situations is the focus. Here is a drawing of the characters who will star in the scene